Security Council

It’s not an election, it’s a Selection. And although all the countries in the United Nations General Assembly have equal rights, some are more equal than others.

Ban Ki-moon retires at the end of this year, and it’s time for the United Nations to choose a new Secretary- General. By the end of this year’s session of the General Assembly, ends in early October, we will know who it is. Which raises two questions: how do they make
the choice, and why should anybody care?

The secretary-general of the United Nations is, in some senses, the highest official on the planet, but the selection process is hardly democratic. In fact, it has traditionally been a process as shrouded in secrecy as a papal conclave.

It is the Security Council’s fifteen members who pick the candidate, although all 192 members of the General Assembly then get to vote on their choice. And even on the Security Council, it’s only the views of the five permanent members (the P5) that really count, because each of the five great powers has a veto and the others don’t.

This is why people with strong opinions and a record of taking decisive action don’t get the job. That sort of person would be bound to annoy one of the P5 great powers – Russia, Britain, China, France and the United States – or even all of them one after the other, so the entire system is designed to prevent a maverick with big ideas from slipping through.

The secretary-general must never come from one of the great powers (that might give him access to enough resources to make a nuisance of himself), and the successful candidate should not be charismatic. The final choice is usually a “safe pair of hands”, some blameless diplomat from a middle or smaller power like the incumbent, a career diplomat from South Korea who ranks 32nd on the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People.

Candidates therefore tend to be relative unknowns. If you look through the current list of candidates, for example, the only two names you might recognise, even if you are a political junkie, are former New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, now Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, and Antonio Guterres, former prime minister of Portugal and later UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

But who is Irina Bokova, Natalia Gherman, or Igor Luksic? They are, in that order, a former acting foreign minister of Bulgaria, the current foreign minister of Moldova, and a former foreign minister of Montenegro. Well, all right, Bokova is also the current director-general of UNESCO, but you still didn’t know her name, did you?

Why so many Eastern Europeans (eight of the twelve candidates come from that region)? Because it’s Eastern Europe’s “turn” this time. That region always missed out until the end of the Cold War, because the countries of Eastern Europe were effectively under Soviet control and therefore contravened the unwritten “no sec-gen from a great power” rule.

You might also ask why Eastern Europe is a whole separate region at all, given that its total population from Poland to Bulgaria is less than the population of Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia or Pakistan. Same reason: it used to be seen as a separate region because it was occupied by Soviet troops and most of its governments were ultimately controlled from Moscow. History looms very large at the UN.

There is some progress. Half of this year’s candidates are female, and there is a strong feeling around the UN that it is high time for a woman to become secretary-general. There is also an attempt this time to make the process more “transparent”, but it is otherwise unchanged. The Security Council still comes up with a single candidate who doesn’t offend any of the great powers, and the General Assembly then rubber-stamps its choice.

It’s basically a civil service job, suitable for persons of cautious disposition. How could it be otherwise? You only get what you pay for, and no great power is yet ready to pay the price in terms of its own sovereignty of having a powerful independent leader at the United Nations.

What would be the point of choosing such a leader anyway, so long as the UN has no military forces or financial resources of its own? It would only lead to frustration: the secretary-general can’t act independently of the will of the great powers because they designed it that way.

The job is still worth doing, and there is never a shortage of applicants. The secretary-general can speak out as the conscience of the world when there are massive violations of human rights, and once in a while she can actually organise a peace-keeping mission to stop the horrors (if all the great powers agree).

And she becomes, by virtue of her position, the most striking symbol of that more cooperative, less violent world that most politicians, diplomats and ordinary citizens actually aspire to. But we are still a very long way from the promised land.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 9 and 10. (“Why…UN”)

“The Security Council cannot go about imposing solutions in crisis situations in various countries of the world,” said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, as the UN began discussing what to do about the Syrian crisis last Friday. He needn’t worry. Even as Syria drifts inexorably towards a catastrophic civil war, nobody else is willing to put troops into the country, so how are they going to impose anything?

You can’t blame them for their reluctance, because Syria isn’t Libya. It is a big country with a powerful army, the core of which will remain loyal to the Assad regime right down to the last ditch. A good 30 percent of the civilian population will join them in the ditch: the Alawites (Shia), the Christians, and some of the Kurds and Druze, all of whom fear that the overthrow of the regime will put the Sunni Arab majority in the driving seat.

That’s where they should be, of course – they are at more than 70 percent of the population – but when revolutions triumphed recently in Tunisia and Egypt, the subsequent elections brought explicitly Islamic parties to parties. There’s no evidence that those parties will actually abuse the civil rights of minorities, but given the increasingly sectarian nature of the struggle in Syria, the minorities there are frightened by the prospect of Sunni power.

So the minorities will stick with President Bashar al-Assad no matter what his forces do to the Sunnis, and there are enough of them, given the regime’s virtual monopoly of heavy weapons, to hold out against either domestic insurgency or foreign military intervention for a long time. That’s why there won’t be any foreign military intervention.

But it’s getting worse in Syria. Several suburbs of Damascus itself have now fallen into rebel hands, and Assad’s forces are shelling neighbourhoods only 5 km. (3 mi.) from the centre of the city. Since last March, about 5,400 people have been killed by the regime’s military and paramilitary troops, and the 200 observers sent by the Arab League in December didn’t even slow the rate of killing.

In desperation, the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission last week and called for Bashar al-Assad to hand over power to a deputy within two weeks. That deputy would then be obliged to form a unity government with the opposition within two months. In other words, it demanded the end of the regime.

In fact, the Arab League has even drafted a joint resolution with Britain, France and Germany that threatens unspecified further measures against the Syrian regime if Assad does not step aside. Nabil al-Arabi, the head of the Arab League, is in New York this week to present it to the Security Council in person.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Syrian regime has already rejected the Arab League’s demand, insisting that what’s really happening in Syria is attacks by “armed terrorist gangs” (i.e. al-Qaeda) backed by Israel and the United States. Ridiculous, but a lot of Alawites and Christians actually believe it.

The worse news is that Russia will veto the resolution before the Security Council anyway. Assad is Moscow’s only real ally in the Middle East, and Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean is on the Syrian coast. Bad Moscow – but the truth is that foreign military intervention would probably not stop the killing at this point unless it was truly massive. That wouldn’t happen even with a dozen Security Council resolutions.

The worst news of all is that this probably means that Syria is heading down into the same kind of hell that Lebanon went through in its fifteen-year civil war (1975-90).

It has just gone on too long. The Syrian protests began as a brave attempt to emulate the non-violent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The Assad regime would kill people, of course, but if the protesters stood fast and refused to kill back, ultimately the regime’s support would just drain away. Non-violence was doubly important in the Syrian case, because if it were a violent revolution various minorities would feel gravely threatened.

Alas, that non-violent strategy has foundered on the rock of Syria’s sectarian and ethnic divisions. Sunni deserters from the army started fighting back, and all the other communities took fright. Now it’s a civil war in which the regime has the heavy weapons but the Sunni Arabs have the numbers.

Syria is just as complex a society as Lebanon, although we can still hope that the war does not go on as long. And it’s entirely possible that the Assad regime, whose senior ranks are mostly drawn from the Alawite minority (only 10 percent of the population), has deliberately chosen civil war. Better that than surrender power and expose the Alawites to the vengeance they fear from all those whom they have ruled for the past forty years.

This does not mean that the “Arab spring” was a mistake, or even that it is over. Few other Arab countries have as divided a population or as ruthless a regime as Syria. But it is still a great tragedy.

Once upon a time, a U.S. president was appalled by the actions of a murderous Arab dictator. He got the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force to stop the dictator, put together a coalition of NATO and Arab countries, and did precisely that. Sound familiar?

The president’s name was George Herbert Walker Bush, and the Arab dictator was called Saddam Hussein. Saddam had invaded the sovereign state of Kuwait, and the U.N. authorized Bush to drive him out again. It did not authorize him to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam – so he didn’t.

The senior Bush has been vilified ever since for sticking to the letter of the U.N. resolution, and not using his army to overthrow Saddam Hussein when he had the chance. What are the odds that President Barack Obama will do the same and not overthrow Moammar Gadhafi in Libya? Pretty good, if you believe what he says.

“Our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives,” Obama said in his speech on March 28, denying that the real goal of the air campaign against Gadhafi’s military forces was regime change. The United States had acted militarily because it “refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action,” but there would be no foreign troops in Libya and no direct attempt to overthrow Gadhafi.

If Obama sticks to that resolve, then there is a very good chance that Gadhafi will still be in power, in the western half of a divided Libya, five years from now. The cities of Tripolitania (western Libya) have already been reduced to submission by his forces, with the sole exception of Misrata, as the rebels in Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) show no sign of being able to defeat his army in the field.

Should Gadhafi try once more to reconquer Cyrenaica, then the air-power of the coalition (basically the NATO countries but also including a few Arab countries) will stop him again. But if he just consolidates his hold on the west, who’s going to force him out? Certainly not the hysterical rabble of rebel fighters who repeatedly charge west along the coast highway, and then come fleeing back as soon as they stumble into the first ambush.

U.S. troops could easily drive Gadhafi from power if they were let off the leash, but Security Council Resolution 1973 does not permit the entry of foreign troops into Libya. Moreover, no Arab country wants to see this too-familiar sight once again.

If Obama abides by the terms of the U.N. resolution, however, he is likely to end up in the same awkward position as his predecessor, President George H.W. Bush. He will have sent U.S. forces into battle, and yet he will not have got rid of the bad guy. But is that such a terrible thing?

George Bush senior was acting to repel an unprovoked invasion when he committed American forces to the liberation of Kuwait, but he was also trying to restore the role of the U.N. Security Council as the bulwark against aggressive war. The Cold War had just ended, and Saddam’s invasion of Iraq was an opportunity to demonstrate how the system should work.

That’s why the senior Bush would not exceed the limits of his authority as an enforcer of the U.N. rules against aggression. The U.N. had not authorized him to overthrow Saddam, and so he did not. He then muddied the waters by calling on the Kurds and Shias of Iraq to rebel, and standing by while Saddam massacred them, but that does not invalidate his original decision.

Fast forward 20 years, and Barack Obama is trying to enforce a fragile new U.N. rule: that the Security Council may authorize military intervention if massive abuses of human rights are being committed by the government. He has carried out the intervention, and the wholesale massacres that would probably have occurred if Gadhafi’s troops had overrun Cyrenaica have been averted.

That’s the limit of Obama’s U.N. mandate, so, like George H.W. Bush, he should now stop. The aerial campaign was meant to prevent mass killing, not to provide the rebels with close air support in what has become a civil war.

One side in this civil war is run by a brutal and cynical dictator, while the people on the other side are brave idealists seeking democracy, but that doesn’t mean that foreigners should decide the outcome. That would be contrary to international law – and besides, if there is to be a real democratic revolution in Libya, then the Libyans must do it for themselves.

If that means that Libya must spend some months or years as a divided country, with the western half still under Gadhafi’s yoke, then so be it. The only legitimate tools that foreigners may use against him are financial sanctions, trade boycotts and diplomatic isolation.

Cut off his cash flow, and Gadhafi might fall quite quickly. Or he might not, which would be a pity. But the only reason that Resolution 1973 got the support of the Arab League, and abstentions by China, Russia and India, was that it authorized military action to “protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack.” And that is all that the coalition should do.

“The great force on which we must rely is the hatred of the cruelty
and waste of war which now exists. As soon as the war is over the process
of oblivion sets in…,” Lord Robert Cecil wrote as the war drew to an end.
“It is only, therefore, while the recollection of all we have been through
is burning fresh that we can hope to overcome the inevitable opposition and
establish…a new and better organisation of the nations of the world.”

Cecil, a member of Britain’s Imperial War Cabinet, wrote that at
the end of the First World War, and the organisation he hoped could prevent
another such war was the League of Nations. It failed, of course, and so we
got the Second World War, which killed five times as many people. By the
end of that one, nuclear weapons were being dropped on cities — so the
victors had no choice but to clone the League, making some significant
improvements, and try again. Sixty years ago this Sunday (26 June), the
Charter of the United Nations was signed by fifty nations in San Francisco.

There was not a single idealist among the men and women who signed
the Charter. They were badly frightened people who had lived through the
worst war in human history and who feared that an even worse one lay in
wait for their children. They were so frightened that they were even
willing to give up the most important aspect of national sovereignty: the
right to wage war against other countries. Six decades later, how is their
organisation doing?

Two things cannot be denied: the UN has already survived three
times longer than its ill-starred predecessor, and the great war it was
meant to prevent has not happened. In the various crises that might have
ended with the superpowers sliding into a nuclear war — the Cuban crisis
of 1962, the Middle East war of 1973, and so on — the United Nations
Security Council was an essential forum for negotiations, and the Charter
provided a new kind of international law that the rivals could defer to
without losing face when they wanted to back away from the crisis.

So why is the United Nations so widely disdained today? One reason
is that Lord Robert Cecil was right: “the process of oblivion sets in”
quickly, and later generations cannot remember why it was so supremely
important to create an organisation to prevent further great-power wars.
Besides, the UN isn’t really all that widely disdained.

It gets a bad press in the United States, but that is mainly
because it acts as a brake on the untrammelled exercise of American
military power. It’s still quite popular in most of the world, although it
continues to annoys nationalists in all the great powers — and at the
other extreme, it frustrates and infuriates all the idealists who want it
to be about justice and democracy and maybe even brotherly love.

It’s not. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator and ambassador
to the United Nations, said in 1955: “This organisation is created to keep
you from going to Hell. It isn’t created to take you to Heaven.” For all
the fine words of the Charter, the UN is still mainly about preventing
another major war between the great powers (and as many other wars as
possible).

Does the United Nations need to be “reformed”? Certainly. It has
acquired some bad habits, and its structures have not kept up with the
realities of a rapidly changing world. The current main focus of reformers
is on the Security Council, whose permanent, veto-wielding members are
still the five victorious great powers of 1945. Three-quarters of the
countries that now comprise the UN were not even independent then, so
clearly some adjustment is overdue.

However, the only imaginable solution is an expansion of the number
of permanent members, because demoting any of the existing permanent
members is unthinkable (and would simply be vetoed). But then come the
questions — how many new members, and which ones, and do they get vetoes
too? — so reform may not happen soon.

Is the UN still more or less functional the way it is? Yes. Its
various specialised agencies, from the World Health Organisation to UNESCO,
do much good work, and its core, the Security Council, is there for when
it’s needed. Most of the time it is not — but when a crisis hits, it
still usually manages to rise to the occasion. It has done particularly
well in the last few years, bending its own rules to support a decisive US
response to terrorism in Afghanistan, but then withstanding enormous
pressure to do the same over the Bush administration’s misbegotten invasion
of Iraq.

The United Nations is an attempt to change the way that
international politics works, because the only alternative was to accept
perpetual war, and by 1945 that was no longer an acceptable option. But
not even the optimists imagined that it could succeed in less than a
century or so.

Sixty years on, it may not yet be even halfway to its goal. No
need to despair. As its most influential secretary-general, Dag
Hammarskjold, used to say: “None of us are ever going to see the world
order we dream of appear in our lifetime. Nevertheless, the effort to
build that order is the difference between anarchy and a tolerable degree
of chaos.”
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 9 and 10. (“However…Iraq”)
Gwynne Dyer is an independent London-based journalist whose
articles are published in 45 countries.